Photograph by: Calgary Herald/Files
, Calgary Herald

CALGARY — Last month, Will Ferguson was the toast of The Centre of the Universe. On the same night he was declared the winner of the prestigious 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize for best Canadian fiction, Rick Mercer lauded him as a genius, while Margaret Atwood took a giant swig of whiskey from his flask.

The rest of Toronto’s literary elite looked mostly bemused that someone was actually handing a westerner a $50,000 cheque for literature. It was, as the kilt-wearing chronicler of all things Canadiana will attest, a surreal, magical moment.

On Tuesday, though, Cowtown’s pride and joy is spitting mad at Hogtown.

“How dare they,” he tells me on the phone from his southwest Calgary home. “Torontonians think they can out-redneck us — because they can.”

To kick off his rant against Toronto, Ferguson points to the elephant in the room: that city’s not-so-esteemed leader.

“We have Nenshi, a popular, Muslim mayor, and we’re on the brink of electing the Green candidate for Calgary Centre,” he says. “For mayor, they have Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard.”

Unprompted, the flustered author and three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour continues his tirade.

“How would they like it if we started running red lights and ordering super latte mochaccinos? It’s just not right.”

I must take full blame for rousing the usually amiable wordsmith to the heights of infuriation. But misery loves company — and outrage calls for even greater strength in numbers.

Kelly appears to have plucked his stereotypes of our fair city and its denizens from a 1960s copy of National Geographic, or perhaps Mad Magazine. He calls Calgarians rodeo clown wearing, beef-eating jerks. The worst part, though, is that a few times he’s actually wrong: in referring to us as banjo-playing hillbillies, he, like so many others before, confuses Calgary for Regina.

All of which has lured me into a pre-Grey Cup bout of trash talking the enemy’s town and its fans — well, sort of. The last time I took this particular flavour of bait was during the Calgary Flames’ 2004 Stanley Cup run. My utterly unoriginal send-up of Vancouver Canucks fans as Birkenstock-wearing, tofu-eating stoners resulted in an email inbox avalanche of obscene letters, penned mostly by vengeful 14-year-old boys from Surrey. The Vancouver columnist spared me just a little, saying I was the girl who was always the last one asked to dance. Ouch.

So, rather than go mano-a-mano with Kelly as our respective athletes prepare for the big game, I am choosing to hide behind the words and smack-talk of more courageous souls than me.

“The great thing about being an Argos fan in Toronto,” says the native Calgarian who divides his time between Los Angeles and Toronto, “is that if you recorded the game at home, you never have to worry about anyone telling you who won ahead of time.

“It’s even harder to find out the score of an Argos game after the fact,” says the diehard Stampeders fan, a Gemini-award winning TV producer now working on a sitcom pilot for CTV called Spun Out. “No one will spoil it for you. No one cares.”

Ferguson agrees that the Toronto Star columnist’s advice on what to do when you meet an opposing team’s fan is not needed for those heading east this week: “As far as running into any diehard Argonaut fans — you can fit all three of them into the back of a taxi.”

Ferguson gets so worked up, he tells me he’s going to run and talk to his brother Ian for more ammunition. An hour later, he calls back, completely deflated.

“I asked him for some good ones,” says Ferguson of his older brother, an Edmonton Eskimos fan who won the 2004 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his book Village of the Small House.

“He just looked off into the middle distance, as a single tear fell onto his cheek … several moments passed quietly, until I finally got up and quietly left.”

Which goes to show you, while it may be fun to trash talk your opponent from time to time, what goes on in the real game is serious business.

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